


Becoming Beautiful: An Aether President Lusamine Manifesto

by IcyKali



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: Analysis of characters and fan reactions, Applies mostly to Sun and Moon-verse only at the moment, Essays, manifesto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 04:02:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9417656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IcyKali/pseuds/IcyKali
Summary: An analysis of Lusamine's character, relationships to other characters, connections to past villains, and the ways she is interpreted by the fandom. Note: this was written before Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon and does not express my current opinions. There is an updated version of this essay.





	

Since the release of _Pokémon Sun and Moon_ , I’ve noticed some trends in fan reactions toward and interpretations of the character Lusamine that I feel don’t make sense or are somewhat disturbing. I’ve also noticed that fans often ignore her entirely in their content. In this manifesto about the character, I will explain the common interpretations and how they are flawed, and will make some suggestions about alternate interpretations that I feel make more sense.

Before I begin, note that Lusamine is a villainous character and I am not condoning any of her actions. However, as I will explain later on in this piece, fans often treat her differently than they treat similar villains, and I think that’s unfair and unfortunate, because she’s an especially well-written and interesting character. I would love to see more fan-created content featuring her, and I hope this piece inspires that. Anyway, without further ado, let’s begin!

 

WHO IS LUSAMINE?

 

Aether President Lusamine is the main villain of _Pokémon Sun and Moon_. She is the leader of the Aether Foundation, an organization in the Alola region that claims to make protecting endangered pokémon its goal. However, President Lusamine has a hidden, separate agenda—she wants to unleash Ultra Beasts, creatures from an alternate dimension, onto Alola. She also wants to enter Ultra Space, said dimension, and stay there with only the things she’s attached to.

In the process of experimenting with dimensional portals, Lusamine cruelly hurts the companion pokémon of her children and also manipulates and shames and insults her children for disobeying her. Lusamine also keeps a collection of frozen pokémon corpses in a special chamber to preserve what she finds appealing.

Eventually, Lusamine isolates herself and Team Skull Boss Guzma in Ultra Space surrounded by the Ultra Beast Nihilego. When the protagonist of the game and Lusamine’s daughter Lillie come to confront her, Lusamine fuses with a Nihilego and attacks. After her pokémon team is defeated, she struggles and attempts to kill her daughter before Solgaleo in Sun or Lunala in Moon forcibly separates her and the Ultra Beast. Lusamine falls into a comatose state, but not before complimenting her daughter.  
Lusamine never appears in-game after this, but Lillie explains to the protagonist that Lusamine is starting to understand that her actions were wrong and that she is taking her to the Kanto region to help her recover from Nihilego’s toxins. Lillie says that now that she’s scolded and confronted her mother in Ultra Space, she plans to gently convince Lusamine to understand why everything she did was wrong.

Lillie and her brother Gladion explain at other points in the game that Lusamine used to be a very caring mother but changed and became abusive over time. Gladion suggests that it happened because Lusamine went mad with grief after her husband, Mohn, disappeared during a dimensional experiment. It is unclear whether Lusamine always had possessive and controlling traits that became extremely amplified after her husband’s disappearance, or if she developed them in response to the fact that she had no control over her husband’s disappearance. In either case, she is clearly a villain and an abusive mother before she begins to correct her behavior.

 

OKAY, WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS?

 

In my opinion, Lusamine is a very well-written villain, especially considering the fact that she’s a character in a game aimed at children. Her motivations are understandable, but not to the extent that she loses all element of mystery. She also has a very good visual design, appropriate musical themes, and a compelling backstory involving loss. She is also an example of both an abusive mother in a series featuring several abusive and neglectful fathers, and an example of an abuser who tries to become a better person. Lusamine is also the first evil team leader in a main series Pokémon game to be a woman.

However, many fans of _Pokémon Sun and Moon_ do not seem to appreciate her character. On Tumblr, fans often say that they hate her and ignore her name. While some fans ignore Lusamine because they are abuse survivors and do not want to be reminded of their trauma, other fans insult her, create AUs where she died instead of surviving, say they wish her children had abandoned her, and call her a monster. These fans don’t seem to consider that Lusamine is said to have wanted to celebrate the protagonist who defeated her, or that she is slowly becoming a better person.

Also, Lillie and Gladion are both highly intelligent, and experienced Lusamine’s abuse for a long period of time. Supporting their choice to try and help their mother recover would likely be more kind and useful to them than convincing them to give up on their mother. There is no evidence that assisting Lusamine is injuring them in any way, and without that evidence, I would argue that trying to make them abandon her is a bad decision and disrespectful toward them. There is also no evidence that Lusamine’s attempt to become a more compassionate person is in any way fake.

 

GUZMA AND LUSAMINE

 

At the moment, the most popular ship involving Lusamine seems to be with Guzma. This ship is an incredibly controversial and divisive one, and in my opinion, both supporters and detractors of the ship are overlooking or misunderstanding key elements of the characters.

Of the fan-created content by supporters of the ship I’ve seen, the majority have been porn involving BDSM, featuring Lusamine as a dominatrix. In many of these works, Guzma is called a “boy” and infantilized by Lusamine, who controls him. This pornography seems to stem from a surface understanding of the characters involving Lusamine’s status as an abusive mother and a powerful woman, and Guzma’s past of being abused by his father and working for Lusamine. Even putting the disturbing implications about past child abuse aside, this common interpretation does not seem to include the mutual respect Guzma and Lusamine show each other. According to Plumeria, Guzma “really likes” Lusamine because she was the first adult to understand his strength, and Guzma shows Lusamine deference. While Lusamine clearly has a warped and terrible interpretation of “love,” she does appear to consider Guzma one of the things she holds dear (she asks him to come to Ultra Space with her, where she mentions she wants to live surrounded by only the things she loves), and when Lillie asks her if she cares about Guzma, she refuses to answer. This suggests that her feelings regarding Guzma are more complicated than her feelings toward other characters, and might even make her vulnerable. If she did not care for him, she would have either lied and said she did, or have told the truth.

Next, detractors of the ship often claim several things that I do not agree with or understand. First, they often say that because Guzma was abused in the past and Lusamine was an abuser, shipping them together is disgusting and would mean that a shipper is condoning abuse. However, this does not take into account that Guzma is no longer a victim of any kind—after retaliating against his father and becoming the leader of Team Skull, Guzma becomes an extremely angry, violent person who hurts his followers to punish them, and who threatens to beat up and possibly kill the eleven-year-old protagonist. He also takes no issue with the frozen corpses Lusamine displays. Guzma is clearly a flawed, villainous person in his own right, who is no longer a victim. And Lusamine, as I explained above, is attempting to correct her behavior and shows no signs of continuing to abuse others. A ship between her and Guzma could feature the two of them helping each other improve.

A second issue detractors bring up is the age difference between Lusamine and Guzma. Because Guzma failed to become a Trial Captain, and Trial Captains cannot be over twenty, Guzma is likely in his early twenties considering his appearance (Steven Stone in _Pokémon OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire_ , as a comparison, is twenty-five). This means that Lusamine is around twice his age. However, while this is a considerable age difference, Guzma and Lusamine both have unique experiences that they could offer each other.

Another criticism detractors often bring up is whether or not fans of the ship only support it due to heteronormative thinking. This could be easily checked by looking at what other pairings the shippers support. I should mention that I support this ship, and the majority of non-canon ships I am passionate about in the Pokémon fandom are relationships between characters who are the same gender. While I can’t speak for other supporters, I certainly do not ship them because they are a man and a woman. I ship them because I think they are well-written characters who could offer each other an interesting friendship and love.

Guzma himself appears to not hold a grudge toward Lusamine (he has no problem with helping her onto Hapu’s Mudsdale). While the fact that he is not angry with her is probably an issue in and of itself, he and Lusamine could discuss and work through their problems together in the future.

 

LUSAMINE AND OTHER VILLAINS

 

A related trend I’ve noticed in the Pokémon fanbase is that many fans seem more critical of Lusamine than they are of other evil team leaders. The Pokémon series has featured other evil team leaders who are terrible parents—namely Team Rocket Boss Giovanni and Team Plasma Leader Ghetsis. Giovanni is a neglectful father who abandoned his son out of his own selfish humiliation, and Giovanni never expressed regret for his actions. His son became an angry and violent person in response to this. Ghetsis is a startlingly abusive father who groomed his foster son, N, to become a figurehead for his team, manipulated him into believing Team Plasma’s dogma, and planned to dispose of his son after taking over Unova. After Ghetsis’s plans failed the first time, he broke down and became much more obviously oppressive toward N—to the point where he tried to incapacitate N’s friend and screamed that N wasn’t even a human being. Ghetsis never expressed any remorse for his actions either. In fact, he mentions that he wishes he could have injured N even more.

Obviously, Lusamine expresses regret and attempts to become a better parent, whereas Giovanni and Ghetsis do not. Despite this, I have never seen fans ignore Giovanni (and not many criticize him, either), and while some fans ignore and hate Ghetsis, he still has many more fans and supporters than Lusamine. This seems unfair to me.

In some cases, fans leave Lusamine out of villain-related content completely. A lot of fanart involving the evil team leaders features every single one of them except for her. However, I rarely see Guzma left out of this art, even though he worked for Lusamine. In one particularly egregious example of this from deviantART, I found a lineup of all the evil team bosses in a particular style an artist created, which featured Lysandre (who is dead), Colress (who many fans either forget was a boss or do not consider a boss), and Guzma (who worked for Lusamine), and Lusamine was missing and not even acknowledged. I wish this was not the case—I find Lusamine to be an excellent villain, and this seems like wasted potential to me.

Speaking of Team Plasma Boss Colress, the difference in the way fans usually treat him versus the way they usually treat Lusamine I find especially unfortunate. These two villains share many traits—they are both bosses of evil teams, they are both slim scientists with blond hair with blue details and a diamond motif, they both have a connection with ice, they have both manipulated children (Lusamine manipulated her children, Colress led the protagonist of _Black 2 and White 2_ against himself and Team Plasma for his own agenda) and have manipulated another member of their team (Lusamine tries to trap Guzma in Ultra Space with her, Colress undermines Ghetsis constantly), and neither of them face much punishment for their villainous actions.

Despite all of these similarities, Colress is a very popular character who many fans think was not a villain and was just misled, while Lusamine is hated and often considered a monster.

 

SO WHAT NOW?

 

I hope that this manifesto will convince fans to take a second look at Lusamine and to create more Lusamine-related content. At the very least, I hope that my manifesto makes it clear that she should be considered a great villain alongside the other evil team leaders of the series. I have personally written a fanfiction about Lusamine recovering in Kanto, a facet of her character that I would love to see given more attention by fans. Tumblr user deadalmond and I have also created a Lusamine-themed playlist which you can listen to [here.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwtS_ioecTaN8CHh5cAnGbUyOnpO2T3LM)  
  


 


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